(highlight:: "All truth, beauty, and progress comes from the union of the unlike": The Philosophy Behind Glen Weyl's Work
Summary:
My career is like the Vulcan philosophy of infinite difference and infinite combinations from Star Trek.
I've been a socialist campaigner, head of the National Teenage Republican Organization, a technocratic economist, and now a figure in the web three space. I've been connected to populist political movements and the neoliberal establishment.
I thrive on contradictions and trying to make something of them.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I think the way I describe it is leaning on a phrase that I often use to substantively describe some of the work, which is it's drawn from Star Trek and the Vulcan philosophy of infinite Difference and infinite combinations. And it says that all truth, beauty, and progress comes from the union of the unlike. And I think that that's a good description of my career. I was a socialist campaigner before I was 10. And I was head of the National Teenage Republican Organization. A few years after that, I was a technocratic economist and total basher of the web three space. And now I'm something of a figure in that space. And I've been connected to populist political movements of various stripes and also, you know, to like the neoliberal establishment. I'm into these contradictions and to trying to make something of that.)
- Time 0:07:48
- snipdpost-queue, favorite, diversity_of_opinion, information_diets, innovation, network_diversity, polarization, societal_progress,

(highlight:: Contact Glen Weyl About Plurality Institute and Radical X Change
Summary:
Setting up a new academic research network called Plurality Research Network.
Encouraging anyone interested in academic research to reach out.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Radical Exchange. I just set up a new academic research network that I invited you guys to call plurality research network. And if anyone listening feels called to academic research in those areas, definitely encourage you to reach out to me at glennetploralitynetwork.org.)
- Time 0:09:05
- snipddont-post,

(highlight:: Two Models of Searching for Truth: Unearthing the Truth v.s. Growing Into The Truth
Summary:
Science is like carving away everything that isn't truth, but I think it's more like an infinite vacuum with trees growing in all directions.
The search for truth is complex and ever-expanding. It's like ecology, where species have multiple solutions to a problem, which continually changes.
I believe in infinite diversity and combinations, and that complexity can emerge from simplicity.
Instead of focusing on the core, we should expect to branch out.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
One metaphor I like is that I think some people have as their image of science. Imagine we're sitting on the surface of a sphere, and they think they're kind of digging down to the core of the truth. They're discarding the earth beneath them, the falsities, and they're going to hit the truth.
Speaker 1
We're carving away everything that isn't science, you're saying?
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I think that the image I have instead is there's an infinite vacuum outside of that sphere, and there are trees growing out from the surface of the sphere in all directions. And as they grow out, more space is available, and they branch and expand. And that just goes on, and it gets more and more complex the further you get out. And that's kind of how I think of the search for the truth. That strikes people maybe initially is a little bit weird. I guess that's how I interpret like beginning of infinity, David Deutsches' phrase. But another way to see that is ecology, the way the species were. Species are all after some abstracted fitness landscape, I guess is one way to conceive of it. But somehow we don't end up with one solution to that problem. In fact, we get a bunch of solutions to the problem, and as that problem gets solved, it actually changes the problem, because now for all the other species you've got to deal with, and There's other species that you can eat, there's all kinds of stuff going on. That's how I think about it. I eat reflecting infinite diversity and infinite combinations. I think that there's just a lot of things going on, and you can build a lot of complexity from a small set of ingredients. And you shouldn't expect to get down to the core, you should expect to branch out from the core.)
- Time 0:11:21
- innovation, snipdpost-queue, complexity, academics, discovery, research, science, scientific_breakthroughs, truth,

(highlight:: Perspective on Managing Different Projects: Cultivating a Garden v.s. Hacking Away in a Mine
Summary:
A friend suggested thinking of my projects as a garden, where some ideas will flourish while others won't. It's less predictable but more enjoyable than physically laboring in the mines.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I remember one point when I was pretty stressed out, and I was saying to my wife, oh my gosh, I've got all these different projects, and I have to work on this one, and I have to work on that One. I have to go to work in the mines. I have to go chip away at this project. And it might work out, it might not work out. And she said to me, you should think of all your projects as more of a gartan. You're planting lots of ideas. Some of them will come up, some of them won't. That's a little unpredictable. But you should think of it that way rather than going down with your hard hat and your pick and toiling away in the pit to find the seam of truth.)
- Time 0:13:33
- snipdpost-queue, digital_gardening, ideation, knowledge_management, research, innovation, pluralism,

(highlight:: Scientific Thinking is Not the Only Type of Thinking
Summary:
The tech industry and academia often overlook continental philosophy and religious thinking.
Deeply religious people are an underrepresented minority. The recent encyclical by Pope Francis is a favorite read.
Different types of thinking, such as Catholic social thought and conservative political thinking, have provided valuable insights.
These traditions are not typically explored by individuals with a similar background.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Yeah, I would reinforce that by saying, I think one thing that even places that are as broad as Santa Fe often miss is things like continental philosophy and religious thinking. I think one of the most underrepresented minorities in the tech industry and in the academy is deeply religious people. There's a lot of interesting stuff there. I think one of my favorite thinkers today is Pope Francis.
Speaker 1
I read the recent encyclical and I really enjoyed it. I could use an editor, but yeah.
Speaker 2
I do think that there are many types of thinking. And we really gain a lot from them. I mean, one tradition that in the last few years I've gained a tremendous amount from his Catholic social thought and conservative political thinking, not libertarian, which is usually What people think conservative means, but actually conservative political thinking. There's a lot of depth there. Anyway, so I both sort of the intersectionality continental tradition and the conservative tradition are ones that I think folks with my type of background don't usually engage with)
- Time 0:15:58
- snipddont-post, inspiration, creativity, ideation, perspective, innovation, intellectual_progress, pluralism, truth, epistemology,

(highlight:: Quadratic Voting: Distributing Voting Power Based on Acoustic Interference
Summary:
"Quadratic voting is a special application of aggressive proportionality," says Lionel Penrose.
It's important to give votes based on correlations and down weight correlated signals instead of giving votes in proportion to power. This concept was used in European treaties to determine voting weights based on population.
Quadratic voting applies this notion to individuals with different preferences.
The quadratic rule has a statistical explanation related to acoustics, where uncorrelated signals cancel each other out, but correlated signals grow stronger.
This metaphor can be applied to ensure fair distribution of voices. Quadratic voting and country applications are just special cases of a broader rule that focuses on coordination and correlation."
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I've come to believe that recently the quadratic voting is really just a very special application of a much broader principle which is currently named aggressive proportionality But I don't think that's way too clunky of a name for something that's so important and fundamental. It was originated by a guy named Lionel Penrose, the father of Roger Penrose, the physicist and it was the observation that if you want to give a certain amount of power to different people It's important that you not give votes in proportion to that power. You have to instead give votes in a way that accounts for the correlations and down weights correlated signals. The original application of this was to how to represent subunits in a federal body on the assumption that the subunit participants were correlated. This was actually used in some European treaties to determine the voting weights of countries based on their populations. But of course countries are just one correlating factor. Quadratic voting is the application of this notion to individuals who might want to express stronger preferences on one issue versus another. But of course individuals aren't the only side of correlation either. There are many sites of correlation and coordination in systems. The quadratic rule in this actually has a very simple statistical explanation that actually can even be brought back to acoustics. The statistical explanation is that uncorrelated signals grow only as the square root of their aggregate size because they on average cancel each other out. The average size of that signal will be as the square root of the number of signals. Whereas correlated signals grow linearly in their strength. And this is something that shows up in acoustics all the time. So if you're in a room with lots of voices, most of them will kind of cancel out and just become noise in the background. And if one is just a bit louder than the others, you'll hear it far louder. And this really is partly driven by human focusing. But to a significant extent driven by literally just these statistical features of how the acoustics work. Because if something's a bit louder and it's all correlated, a lot of uncorrelated stuff just cancels each other out and becomes noise. And so we can apply that metaphor to thinking about how we have to hear voices in a fair way. And I think that the quadratic voting and this application to countries are all just very, very special cases of a far broader rule that we're only beginning to understand how to apply. Which is how do we take seriously all the sources of coordination and correlation and make these adjustments to them so that we can hear all the voices fairly.)
- Time 0:23:47
- snipddont-post, decision-making, election_science, voting_methods, quadratic_voting, acoustic_interference, acoustics,

(highlight:: Protocol Labs - https://protocol.ai/
Summary:
Labs
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Protocol Labs.)
- Time 0:30:57
- snipddont-post, action,

(highlight:: JCR Lick Lider's Unrealized Vision for the Internet and The Public/Private Infrastructure Needed to Make It
Summary:
The internet’s current state was predicted and warned about by one of the key figures in its development, JCR Licklider.
In 1979, he outlined the need for public-private partnerships to build additional infrastructure for the internet to succeed. He accurately predicted that if left to the private sector alone, IBM would dominate and ruin it.
The problems we face today were foreseen and are mainly a result of capitalism's shortcomings, rather than the failure of the original visionaries.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
The first thing I would highlight is that the internet has not turned out as well as one might have hoped. But it was fairly predictable, I believe, and in fact, predicted by the people who had the best version of the vision for it that that was going to happen. JCR Lick Lider, who I think was probably the most important figure in taking those early ideas of doing Zimmel and turning them into a technical substrate, he was the ARPANET program Officer who found that the first five computer science departments in the country and who built the ARPANET. In 1979, as TCPIP was coming together, he wrote a wonderful piece called Computers in Government in which he said, look, we did some proof concept of the basic information structure Here, but for this thing to actually work, here's all the other things we're going to need. If you don't build them through public-private partnerships like how we built TCPIP and instead just leave it to the private sector, he said IBM is going to own the whole thing and here's How they're going to ruin it. Now, of course, it was an IBM. It was the future IBM's. But you got exactly what he predicted. In fact, many of the pathologies are literally described in graphic detail as they've turned out in that piece. I think it was to people who were really focused on it quite predictable, that there were other elements that were needed to build a network society and that they couldn't be supplied By the capitalist process on its own. I think it's very sad we've ended up there, but I don't think it's right to think of it as mostly a failure of those original visionaries. I think it's mostly a failure of the capitalist, the tender graces of capitalism to which the process was eventually left.)
- Time 0:33:09
- capitalism, history_of_the_internet, networked_society, web3, snipddont-post, action, digital_gardening,

(highlight:: While Algorithmic Decision-Making Does Suffer From Bias, It Offers the Potential for Unparalleled Transparency In the Decision-Making Process
Summary:
Algorithms offer a transparent and accountable way for decision making.
They can detect bias and perpetuated patterns, but must be transparent, independently audited, and not proprietary or snake oil.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And then the response comes back saying yes but if you're basing it on historical data then you're feeding in biases of the past which you're going to propagate into the future there Is a kind of new attitude about all this which is kind of orthogonal to these two axes which I personally find pretty compelling and it's come up in from a couple of different places independently I could drop a few names but let me just say that the attitude is that algorithms at their best offer a new way for decision making to be transparent and accountable that's at their best So you know if an algorithm is something that everyone understands how it works everyone understands why we are chose to use this algorithm how it was trained and it's something which Can be independently audited it's even something which could be tinkered with to see if it could be made more fair and more accurate that kind of algorithm could raise the standard of Decision making in many areas and let us detect bias where it crops up and also help us detect where historical patterns are being perpetuated and what we might do to fix that but the big But is they have to be transparent they have to be independently audited they can't be proprietary and opaque and hidden behind veils of intellectual property and they also can't just Be snake oil right so there is a lot of snake oil out there there's a lot of products being put out to market which have not in any sense been independently verified or validated and where Their users and customers frankly don't really know whether their results ought to be interpreted the way they ought to be interpreted and so there needs to be a lot more critical thinking Aimed at these)
- Time 0:45:51
- decision-making_bias, algorithmic_bias, bias, decision-making, decision-making_transparency, algorithmic_decision-making, snipdpost-queue,

(highlight:: The need for transparent and democratic decision-making: Human bullshit and algorithmic bullshit are two sides of the same coin
Summary:
Data and algorithms are not inherently bad, but they should be used in a transparent and democratic way that empowers everyone.
Instead of arguing about whether computer or human decision-making is better, we should focus on accountable and transparent decision-making. This means avoiding human biases and stereotypes as well as naive machine learning without considering its real-world implications.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So the point is that it's not that data and algorithms are bad it's that they need to be applied in a way which is transparent and which is democratic and which empowers all of us to carry On these debates rather than simply being tools which accurately or inaccurately are being used to buy the powerful to control the rest of us it's silly to argue about which is better You know computer decision making or human decision making that's really not the point I mean the point is we should have accountable transparent decision making instead of bs there's Human bs which comes in the form of stereotypes in ideology and there's algorithmic bs which comes in the form of naive machine learning without thinking enough about its applications)
- Time 0:52:15
- algorithmic_decision-making, decision-making_transparency, algorithmic_bias, bias, decision-making_bias, snipdpost-queue,

(highlight:: Technology and AI doesn't have to be just an add-on to existing society: it can enable new societal structures that allow people to live vastly different lives
Summary:
AI technology has the potential to help us live more diverse and flexible lives, like the universal translator in Star Trek.
This can be achieved by using statistical processing tools and neural networks to better understand and coexist with each other. Rather than focusing on replacing existing systems, we should aspire to a socio-technical change that allows for more creativity and innovation.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
We need to understand that there are goals that our technology has but there are roles that we want it to play in our society so like just to give you a an example of this this contrast that's Close to those examples one way to think of ai is like oh this is better or worse than human to doing this but another way to think about it is that right now in order to like live with each Other and with some amount of order we all have to like take standard courses and like have private property and like do all these practices that were like imposed by either colonialism Or like some viberian bureaucracy in the 19th century that like are not particularly well founded in like any reasonable historical or psychological theory of like what actually Allows people to like enjoy themselves and like be happy and we have to do all that stuff so other people can make sense of us so that like there's some form that we can fill in and that you Can imagine a world where we have really high powered statistical processing tools with a lot of neural whatever going on that enable us to make sense of each other while living much More diverse and flexible lives and that would be pretty cool the universal translator in star trek let's people sort of get along reasonably cooperatively well just like being very Different from each other or at least having different years but yeah yeah well in the original series and you know in discovery and it starts getting more and more different and that's Actually cool because it's precisely actually that's a great example technology of various kinds that we've developed has allowed us to imagine much more different things over time And to me that's an inspiration worth having we could use statistical systems to live more flexible and diverse lives rather than to like replace the existing thing and do it 7% more Accurately or whatever and I hope that we together will aspire to that kind of socio-technical change rather than to have debates over who does something that's really boring and problematic To begin with)
- Time 0:53:57
- artificial_intelligence_ai, imagined_orders, futurism, humanism, techno-utopianism, collective_understanding, social_constructs, snipddont-post,

(highlight:: "What Information Consumes Is Attention" and The Thermodynamics of Communication
Summary:
Herbert Simon's quote about information consuming attention is a crucial point to consider.
Emails can be overwhelming, as there is a limit to the amount of time and attention we have. It is important not to solely rely on the internet as a copying machine, but to acknowledge the real material scarcities and limitations.
While there is room for improvement, there are still real world limits to communication effectiveness.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
Herbert Simon's famous 1971 quote that what information consumes is attention feels like such a crucial point that I made it my email signature you know because like you said earlier Glenn that you know the value is really in in the relationships and there are differentially scalable qualities here I think a lot about the way and Doug Rushkoff and others have pointed Out that you can have at least you know indefinitely many emails a day but you only have so much time and attention to read them and that this is part of the argument for the importance of Not just following the sort of logic of the internet as a great copying machine off a cliff right where we're imagining an abundance that is nonetheless still founded in real material Scarcities you know like David Wolpert talks about you know the thermodynamics of communication and there being a theoretical limit to how effective that can be and while we still Have plenty of room you know orders of magnitude to improve on that you know that there are these real world limits that we're eventually going to bump up into)
- Time 0:56:43
- attention, information, action, snipdpost-queue,

(highlight:: The Hyperfocus on Reducing Algorithmic Bias v.s. Using Algorithms to Maximize Diversity
Summary:
Instead of debating the bias in algorithms, we should focus on building algorithms that maximize diversity.
Intersectionality makes achieving a completely diverse class impossible, but we can strive to approximate an optimally diverse class while considering other criteria. Let's shift the frame from playing defense and embrace pluralism as a technological trajectory.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Another example sick growing back to what I was riffing on Chris's comments about which is why not rather than mostly focusing on a debate over how biased or not some particular algorithm Is instead say how could we build algorithms to maximize diversity which is a really complicated thing once you take into intersectionality seriously right like once you take intersectionality Seriously you realize that there is no meaning to a diverse class or whatever you can't ever have a diverse class that's completely it's conceptually impossible there's no way you Could from an intersectionality perspective possibly have a group of a thousand students who are representative of the population that's meaningless right but you can ask the question How could we approximate something like an optimally diverse class subject to other criteria that we also have you know that's a really interesting intellectual question and why Don't we work on algorithms that help us approximate that optimum we just need to like shift the frame from like playing defense and being like here's these algorithms and they're coming And they're just going to impose this very standard totalizing thing and instead say no pluralism is on the march you know like let's actually be really serious about pluralism and Let's pursue it as a technological trajectory)
- Time 1:00:38
- algorithmic_decision-making, algorithmic_design, artificial_intelligence_ai, algorithmic_bias, emerging_technology, snipddont-post,

(highlight:: Adversarial instead of truth-seeking engagement is baked into so many aspects of our society
Summary:
Our society often relies on adversarial advocates for decision-making, but this approach doesn't lead to the truth.
We need a cooperative effort where people are open to changing their minds and acknowledging different perspectives. This applies to civic organizations, legal systems, political systems, and even neighborhood associations.
We tend to punish those who disagree with the established opinion, leading to a lack of pluralism.
We should strive for diverse viewpoints and a cooperative search for the truth.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
There's a thing wrong with our society which is we have even the institutions that work reasonably well in our society are still often built around adversarial advocates in which the Idea is i will argue as passionately as possible for one side you will argue as passionately as possible for the other side we will deploy whatever resources we can rhetoric money etc And somehow we like to think that by i don't know interpolation that will arrive at the truth and that's totally not true right i mean i we know that there are lots of types of decision-making Where that's a disaster where what you need is not these two sides each of which are deliberately undercutting the other as effectively and including viciously as they can but you want Everybody to be willing to change their mind openly publicly to be willing to publicly acknowledge the point that the other person is making and you want to sense that people are cooperatively Working together toward the truth but that's not how most civic organizations work it's not how our legal system works it's not our political system works nowadays maybe there was Some golden age in the past but it did probably not it's not even how neighborhood associations work right i mean there may be some diversity in how homeowners associations work internally Although i regret to say i don't think that's usually true because they're usually very self-selected groups of people who are quite vocal but once they arrive at a decision they're Like good old-fashioned Maoist democratic centralists you know like well we represent the neighborhood and this is our monolithic opinion and if somebody shows up and says well i Live in that neighborhood but i i actually don't agree then they they get piled on and punished and if somebody says i'm an environmentalist but this environmental organization doesn't Speak for me or i belong to this racial or ethnic group but i don't necessarily agree with what the claimed representatives of that group say that group wants they get punished again A lack of pluralism but i think it's not just a lack of diversity it's this notion that the way to get make decisions is for everybody to hammer their stake as firmly into the ground as they Can)
- Time 1:03:24
- pluralism, adverserial_engagement, polarization, truth, conflict_entrepreneurship, decision-making, large-scale_cooperation, participatory_democracy, truth-seeking, group_dynamics, snipdpost-queue, consensus, identity_politics, unanimity,

(highlight:: Prediction Markets Are Built on the Principle of Adverserial Engagement
Summary:
Prediction markets may not be the solution many think, as they foster an adversarial relationship and encourage being right at the expense of others.
While incentives and information are useful, betting against each other for a big payoff doesn't lead to good social outcomes.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
There the first is what you're describing is precisely the reason why i am a bit of a skeptic of prediction markets not to say that they don't have a role but i don't think that they are nearly The solution that many believe they are and it's because they set us up in an adversarial relationship with regards to determining the truth it's not at all the say i don't think incentives Have a role or that it isn't worth a listening information for me i believe in all those things but the notion that the way that we should do it is betting against each other so that we want Everyone else to be as wrong as possible so we can be right and we want to get like one big payoff for like the person who's most right and anything that can be like too easily analogized To some sort of like dick measuring contest is not something that like excites me as a mechanism for like coming to good social outcomes and i think that prediction markets have an important Element of that)
- Time 1:08:57
- snipdpost-queue, adverserial_engagement, decision-making, market_economics, prediction_markets, truth, truth-seeking,
- [note::See also: Complexity podcast on prediction markets]

(highlight:: Pol.is: An Example of Tools for Facilitating Non-Adverserial Debate at Scale
Summary:
A twitter-like system in Taiwan guides conversations towards consensual outcomes by using k-means clustering.
It's a simple proof of concept for fact checking and has been effective in large-scale conversations. The science of plurality can advance to help navigate complexity in diverse opinions.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Pol.is i don't know if you guys are familiar with that but it's a system used in Taiwan it's a twitter like format but it deliberately guides conversations towards consensual or partially Consensual outcomes while highlighting the differences that exist in the conversations in a non-judgmental way and it's just a wonderful system and at the same time it's like the Most simplistic proof of concept of the general direction it uses k-means clustering of stated opinions it doesn't use any natural language processing it's like the bargain basement Version of what it's trying to achieve but it still has been transformatively effective for these types of conversations at scale in Taiwan and is being adopted if it survives by the Twitter bird watch folks as the foundations of what they're trying to do for fact checking so i do believe that there is a science here that can advance dramatically i think that we have Not chosen to apply ourselves to it because we've been seduced by oh we're going to do the unbiased algorithm that's going to predict the truth the right way rather than saying no people Are diverse you have a lot of different opinions how do we actually help people navigate that complexity so i really am hopeful that this science what i would call plurality really can Advance and and help us do these things much better and again i'll put in the plug if you're a researcher interested in these things we're trying to build an academic community that really Wants to work on them right to me at when at pluralitynetwork.org)
- Time 1:10:12
- pluralism, debate_mapping, techno-utopianism, snipdpost-queue, decision-making, participatory_democracy, large-scale_decision-making, decision-making_tools,